Chasing the Chesapeake Update and Speculation

Chasing the Chesapeake is only about a month away, and I'm starting to get excited! Our flight leaves late Friday morning for the event. Sadly, I wasn't able to rearrange my work schedule quite to the extent I wanted, so I'm going to have to work all night Thursday night and take a later flight to Philadelphia to the event - which means we're going to miss all or most of Friday's festivities. Our flight to Philadelphia isn't scheduled to arrive until 4:45 pm, which doesn't leave much time for the evening's events. Oh well! I'm sure Saturday will be a blast. We aren't doing the Halloween contest either, so we'll have to be content to be "flies on the wall" as it were.

On to speculation about the special run models! Since three-day eventing is the theme, I'm expecting to mostly see Thoroughbred or warmblood molds used for this event. So, I wouldn't be surprised to see Ruffian, Smarty Jones, Lonesome Glory, Valegro, Salinero, Carrick, Totilas and more make appearances here. Lonesome Glory, Carrick and Totilas might be slightly less likely to be used since they were all used for the 2014 Big Easy Bash, and Salinero has been used for these types of events twice before, so I don't know if he would show up again.

Other molds I could see them using, in no particular order: Big Ben, Show Jumping Warmblood, Bolya (ugh), Cigar, Flash, Gem Twist, Strapless, maybe some of the old Herrick molds (double ugh), Idocus, and possibly some of the less popular Hess molds (Hanoverian, Touch of Class, Trakehner).

Ruffian stays first on my list of possible molds here, because she fits the theme and has never been used for this type of event. I'll just have to hope she isn't the centerpiece model. Ideally she'll be this year's version of last year's Four Stars, but that might be too much to hope for. Valegro is also high on the list due to how he's been used so far: regular run release, then raffle model: i.e. very similar to how Totilas was used in 2013. Totilas then was used as the 12-piece run Zydeco at the Big Easy Bash, so I would not be surprised if Valegro shows up in the same capacity (maybe larger than a 12-piece run since the upper price range at the event is $185).

As for the ticket Stablemate we'll presumably all get with Chesapeake, I'm going to go with the safe option and say we'll probably get a G2 Thoroughbred or Warmblood, either of which would be fine with me.

To close, all I can say is that it's going to be a long month's wait to find out what we're getting. I hope they throw us a bone and reveal at least one of the SRs beforehand to tide us over.